I am not a book reviewer. In all honesty, I haven’t done any book review that was more than a couple of sentences since the horror days when I had to do book reports for school. Why? When? Where? How? I always disliked setting down my gut instinct in print, especially since the books we read were generally chosen for academic edification rather than any sort of real pleasure. They were read because we should read them, not because I had any real desire to do so!

I’ve become a very different reader in some ways; as inevitably as I change with age, so does my reading. Books I used to love retain nostalgia but do not always hold up to the test of time and authors I once adored are no longer on my reading list, in some cases because their writing has deteriorated and in others because I didn’t realise how bad it was in the first place! These days I’m more critical of books than I once was, although I’m still pretty forgiving of bad writing if a plot line is good. Still, fifteen years ago I might have tried harder to complete a series like Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth,” whereas these days I acknowledged how much I disliked them and after giving the second book a chance to improve on the first, gave up on the series entirely when it didn’t.

Anyway.

The Kite Runner is one of those books I only picked up because I’d heard of it thanks to all the publicity about the film, and because it was on a “Buy One, Get One 1/2 Off” offer at WHSmith’s in the hospital when I was waiting to get my prescriptions from the pharmacy. I’ve finally gotten around to reading it, a week later, and am going to give a go at summarizing my feelings about it, although I make no promises!

My friend Jenn said quite plainly that she hated the book and I knew that before I’d started reading it. Having encountered a very bad review before starting a book puts a spin on it (perhaps part of the reason I rarely read any sort of reviews before picking up a book). I was waiting to find out what she could have disliked so much and as a result part of my own perception was tinged; this was not necessarily a bad thing but it obviously affects my review!

A brief synopsis: Amir, a young boy growing up in Kabul before the collapse of the monarchy and subsequent Russian involvement in Afghanistan, is the narrator of the story. His family, consisting of his father and himself, is affluent; his father’s best friend Ali is also his servant, living in a mud hut behind the house, and Ali’s son Hassan is Amir’s closest companion (he does not call him “friend”) during their childhoods. Hassan is a year younger than Amir and the master/servant relationship, while not burdensome, is one that Amir cannot quite escape in his feelings about the younger boy.

Without giving away too much of the plot, Hassan faces considerable difficulties with the other children in the neighbourhood because he and his father are Hazana, a minority (Shi’a) tribe among the majority (Sunni) Pashtun inhabitants of Kabul. Amir fails to protect Hassan from a particularly vicious physical attack by a neo-Nazi Pashtun boy (ironic, considering that Hitler would have no doubt considered all Afghans to be sub-human) and his guilt over the attack and his own cowardice in failing to prevent it causes him to eventually compel Hassan and Ali’s departure from Kabul.

Amir and his father finally flee the city as well as the political and military situation in Afghanistan collapses and while Amir is able to make a life for himself in the USA, his guilt over Hassan niggles at him until, as a middle-aged man, he is called back to Afghanistan by an old family friend. There he learns of a startling revelation regarding Hassan and his family and an obligation that will, he hopes, be some small act of redemption for his past failures.

Hosseini’s writing style is easy to read and descriptive. In many ways I liked Amir, as his persistent sense of failing to live up to his father’s expectations rang true for my childhood as well. I also know little or nothing of Afghanistan, save for media portrayals in the news, so it was refreshing to find such vivid, and essentially positive, descriptions of its pre-Russian/Taliban culture. Discussion of the political situation during Amir’s youth is essentially absent but I would not have expected it to be there, as a pre- and early-teenage boy wouldn’t necessarily have had any real awareness of this! It does inspire me to do more reading on the topic, however.

What started to bother me after the first few chapters was the fundamental selfishness of Amir’s character. Although I know that this is pretty much the way children and teenagers act, both in fiction and reality, I found myself really disliking him at many points, particularly in the way that he treated Hassan. I know that this can all be explained in light of cultural mores and age, I think it’s also the reason I didn’t much like junior high and high school children/teens (and generally still don’t). I know I had that same self-focused selfishness but there is also something very uncomfortable about reading such a stark description of it.

The story itself, although it has a reasonably happy ending, is also full of sadness. This is only to be expected, given the subject matter, but I tend to like my books mostly upbeat and this one was not, could not be. Most of the difficult situations were always going to exist in a book about Afghanistan, particularly when Hosseini had to give Amir a reason to break so completely with his childhood shadow, Hassan, but sometimes the negativity seemed arbitrary. Why make Amir’s wife infertile? Why eventually give him a scar in the same place on his lip that Hassan (born with a cleft lip) had a scar after his plastic surgery? The latter point, in particular, seemed contrived and unnecessary – it didn’t need to be there for the book to work. Neither did the attempted suicide of Hassan’s young son at the end of the book.

I didn’t dislike this novel and certainly didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it. I probably won’t read the book again any time soon; I probably will pass it on to a charity shop but I didn’t hate it. It just left me feeling uncomfortable and not just because of the topic of Afghanistan, which I think should make any American uncomfortable! It just felt in so many ways like another “Oprah’s Book Club” book – ruining an otherwise interesting story and good writing by tossing in a bit of sexual dysfunction.

Completely unrelated to the plot of the book, I really did hate the fact that they had to stick a “Reading Guide” at the end of this edition. They always end up feeling like those awful junior high book reports and I always wonder why in the world they’re needed; I may not be great at book reviews but frankly I don’t need someone to write questions up for me like, “How does Hosseini succeed in bringing the horror of the Taliban to life? Why did he choose the role for Assef that he did?” The questions are either too basic, silly, or completely irrelevant and smack of middle-aged book clubs sitting around with nothing to say [/end rant and snobbishness!]

(Spoiler alert!). If I am completely honest, I think that the popularity of the book is at least partially based on the fact that Hassan is raped and modern Western bestsellers seem to be extraordinarily fond of childhood sexual trauma as a plot point. I’m not sure what he would have used to trigger Amir’s guilt over the incident and his failure to act instead of this but I also feel that Hosseini was, in a way, selling out to popular tastes in making the subject so central to the book’s plot.